Long-Stalled Crime Bill to Get Jump-Start : Congress: Conferees’ meeting today is expected to lead to a House vote this week. It’s the costliest such legislation to be so close to enactment.

A compromise version of the long-stalled $30-billion crime bill appears likely to take a giant step toward final congressional passage this week as Senate and House negotiators convene today for their first substantive meeting in three months.

The measure, which Democratic leaders want to send to President Clinton before Congress starts its August recess, is expected to include funds for 100,000 police officers, about $8.4 billion for prisons and almost as much for crime prevention and drug treatment programs.

Bogged down in controversy despite its passage by overwhelming majorities in the Senate last November and in the House last April, the legislation is the most costly and comprehensive crime bill ever to be so close to enactment.

House Democratic leaders reluctantly decided last week to eliminate the hotly debated “racial justice” measure from the final version of the bill, angering the Congressional Black Caucus but virtually assuring Senate approval without a filibuster.

Proponents said the provision would assure fairness in imposing the death penalty by allowing a challenge to murder convictions on the basis of statistics showing that a jurisdiction had applied the death penalty more frequently to one race than to another. Opponents said it would result in a racial quota system for executions and eventually eliminate death sentences entirely.

Another controversial item, a ban on assault-style weapons, which passed by a two-vote margin in the House and survived a Senate showdown by a single vote, is expected to be in the bill despite opposition from Rep. Jack Brooks (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who will preside over the Senate-House conference committee.

Brooks is expected to push for a weaker substitute but advocates of the ban said they have the votes to defeat efforts to water down the measure.

While many details remain to be resolved, the crime bill was put on the House schedule for Thursday, and Senate officials said it is possible, but not likely, that it will be acted on in the upper chamber at the end of the week.

“It is time to move forward, reach accord and move promptly to a vote on the floors of the House and Senate,” Brooks said in scheduling today’s meeting, the first since a mid-June session that produced nothing but flowery speeches on the subject of crime.

“Everyone’s going into conference with the hope that it can be wrapped up Tuesday,” said an aide to Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who will lead Senate conferees.

Alluding to the bitter fights over the “racial justice” measure, the assault-weapons ban and the division of funds for police, prisons and crime prevention activities, Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of the conferees, was optimistic. “Now that these three issues are pretty well sorted out, the bill should move pretty quickly through conference,” he said. “We hope to have the bill on the President’s desk by the August recess,” which starts Aug. 12.

Despite the desire to wrap up work on the bill, however, major differences remain on whether to make nearly every crime involving the use of a gun a federal offense, a provision in the Senate bill, or whether to reject such an unprecedented expansion of federal authority.

In addition, conferees appeared to be split over whether to put strings on prison construction funds that would force states to certify that their prisoners serve at least 85% of their sentences before states could qualify for federal assistance.

Both the Senate and House, however, approved a provision that would require life sentences for anyone convicted of three violent crimes--the so-called three-strikes-and-you’re-out law that was first enacted in Washington state.

Under a tentative agreement negotiated by Brooks and Biden, the crime bill would approve spending about $30 billion during the next six years from a new trust fund, which would be financed by using money saved from reductions in the federal work force.

Of this total, about $11 billion would be earmarked for state and local law enforcement, including funds for 100,000 community-based police officers. Another $8.4 billion would be allocated for state and local prisons, with $7.6 billion for crime prevention programs aimed at teen-agers and young adults in high-crime neighborhoods.